It occurred to some one in this talk at last to deny that there was this tiresome monotony in American life.  And this put a new face on the discussion.  Why should there be, with every race under the heavens represented here, and each one struggling to assert itself, and no homogeneity as yet established even between the people of the oldest States?  The theory is that democracy levels, and that the anxious pursuit of a common object, money, tends to uniformity, and that facility of communication spreads all over the land the same fashion in dress; and repeats everywhere the same style of house, and that the public schools give all the children in the United States the same superficial smartness.  And there is a more serious notion, that in a society without classes there is a sort of tyranny of public opinion which crushes out the play of individual peculiarities, without which human intercourse is uninteresting.  It is true that a democracy is intolerant of variations from the general level, and that a new society allows less latitude in eccentricities to its members than an old society.

But with all these allowances, it is also admitted that the difficulty the American novelist has is in hitting upon what is universally accepted as characteristic of American life, so various are the types in regions widely separated from each other, such different points of view are had even in conventionalities, and conscience operates so variously on moral problems in one community and another.  It is as impossible for one section to impose upon another its rules of taste and propriety in conduct—­and taste is often as strong to determine conduct as principle —­as it is to make its literature acceptable to the other.  If in the land of the sun and the jasmine and the alligator and the fig, the literature of New England seems passionless and timid in face of the ruling emotions of life, ought we not to thank Heaven for the diversity of temperament as well as of climate which will in the long-run save us from that sameness into which we are supposed to be drifting?

When I think of this vast country with any attention to local developments I am more impressed with the unlikenesses than with the resemblances.  And besides this, if one had the ability to draw to the life a single individual in the most homogeneous community, the product would be sufficiently startling.  We cannot flatter ourselves, therefore, that under equal laws and opportunities we have rubbed out the saliencies of human nature.  At a distance the mass of the Russian people seem as monotonous as their steppes and their commune villages, but the Russian novelists find characters in this mass perfectly individualized, and, indeed, give us the impression that all Russians are irregular polygons.  Perhaps if our novelists looked at individuals as intently, they might give the world the impression that social life here is as unpleasant as it appears in the novels to be in Russia.